Warner to perform ‘From the Mountains to the Sea’ at Old Songs

One of the 200 photos the elder Warners took in their travels from the Adirondacks through the deep south, which will be on display Saturday during Jeff Warner’s performance of “From the Mountains to the Sea” at Old Songs in Voorheesville. This photo is believed to be of the Nathan Hicks family.
PHOTO PROVIDED

This photo, believed to be of LM Presnell, is one of the 200 photos the elder Warners took in their travels from the Adirondacks through the deep south that will be on display Saturday during Jeff Warner’s performance of “From the Mountains to the Sea” at Old Songs in Voorheesville.
PHOTO PROVIDED

VOORHEESVILLE >> “Tom Dooley” is the song that launched the international folk revival in 1958. The Kingston Trio sold 3 million copies of the single about a Civil War two-timer hanged for killing one of his girlfriends.

But that song might never have precipitated the movement that launched the careers of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez or led to the coffeehouse scene that gave us Caffè Lena or Eighth Step if it weren’t for the work of the parents of Saturday’s Old Songs performer Jeff Warner.

Warner’s show is called “From The Mountains to The Sea” and offers a two-hour multimedia retrospective of the work Anne and Frank Warner did when they travelled rural America from 1938 to ’66 in search of old songs. One of those songs was “Tom Dooley.”

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“It was one of the three songs that Frank Proffitt sang for my parents the first day they met in ’38,” Jeff Warner said.

The couple returned to Greenwich Village from North Carolina and sang the song for noted musicologist Alan Lomax, who put it in his 1947 book, “Folkways USA.” When Proffitt heard the Kingston Trio version more than a decade later, he vowed to shoot the group for ruining a perfectly good local song.

Come to find out the elder Warner was not a professional musician and didn’t write music. The version the Kinston Trio recorded was Frank Warner’s interpretation.

“So Frank Proffitt saw the Kingston Trio play it on television and thought that he was being insulted,” Jeff Warner said. “My father had to go to North Carolina and tell him that was not the case.”

Proffitt, who’d learned the song from his aunt eventually, calmed down and sent the Warners a letter saying that he had to stop looking from mountain to mountain and look from sea to sea. Hence the title of Saturday’s Old Songs performance, “From The Mountains to The Sea.”

In an out-of-court settlement, the organization that copyrighted the song for Lomax got no money, but Proffitt received enough royalties to build a new house. Saturday’s show includes 200 photos the elder Warners took during their travels from the Adirondacks through the deep south.

Jeff Warner quoted Mike Seeger as saying that up until 100 years ago if you even heard music, it was played by somebody in the same room as you. It’s hard for us today to imagine a time when all live music was local and most of it old.

When the Warners first ventured to North Carolina in a rented car, they were considered aliens from the great “beyont with a ‘T.’” And when they asked Nathan Hicks to make a dulcimer for them, Hicks had 10 children and was so poor he couldn’t afford to buy the raw materials to make the instrument.

“At the time,” Warner said, “nobody had seen a dulcimer in New York because Jean Ritchie hadn’t come out of Kentucky with her dulcimer and very few people were playing it.”

Frank and Anne first started photographing these rural American Gothic personalities and collecting their songs on a portable windup recorder. At the time, few people gave their music any thought. By the time the Warners retired in 1965, “great folklorists were turning out Ph.D. people. There were lots of folks in the field looking for old songs. I think they didn’t find major sources again. They were settling into my father’s retired life of being a singer rather than a YMCA executive.”

Jeff Warner estimates that 20 percent of his repertoire comes out of his parent’s collection, and the rest comes from other British and American traditional roots songs.

“Maybe five percent of what I do, I know the author of,” he said.

Unlike so many of my associates in the blues field, Jeff Warner is not concerned about whether he and others keep old songs alive because, he said, it’s all recorded so that if it suddenly becomes fresh again in 100 years, the artists of the day will be able to refer to the recordings of his parents and artists like The Kingston Trio who were inspired by them.

Old songs

WHAT: Jeff Warner, “From the Mountains to the Sea”

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Old Songs, 37 South Main St., Voorheesville

TICKETS: $20, $5 for children 12 and younger; 518-765-2815 or JeffWarner.ticketderby.com

Callout: When Frank Proffitt heard the Kingston Trio version of “Tom Dooley,” he vowed to shoot the group for ruining a perfectly good local song.